Mike made no response. He only said, “There’s our exit.”
He guided the Jeep off the highway to the ramp. We came to a little town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by hills. We passed a small strip of gas stations and restaurants. Then we left the town behind. We were on a small lane winding more deeply into the rolling grasslands. As the car meandered into nowhere, the last light of day faded into night.
The last night before the New Year, before the Great Death.
We were on a lonely road, not a light anywhere. I turned to Mike. I could only just make out his steady features in the green glow from the dashboard.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
“But…”
“After you told me you were going to join the prisoners in their escape, I contacted every special ops guy I knew, every undercover source I had. I sent out the word through every network I have that I needed to get in touch with Rose.”
“Rose? Did you? Did you get in touch with him?”
“No,” Mike said. “I didn’t have to. Rose got in touch with me.” He glanced over at me. “He sent me to find you. They still need you, chucklehead.”
He lifted his chin toward the windshield. I turned and followed his gesture.
We had come off the road now. We were bumping down a dirt lane. Up ahead, in the glow of the headlights, I could see an empty field, the grass cut low. In the middle of the field there was a grassless strip of hard-packed dirt. It was a landing strip. A small Cessna airplane was sitting at one end of it.
And Rose was leaning against the fuselage, waiting for us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Night Flight
“Well, you’re out of the frying pan,” Rose told me. “But now you’re really in the fire.”
His voice came over my headset as the Cessna moved through the night sky. The stars drifted slowly past at the windows. Sporadic lights appeared below and went slowly by.
I was sitting up front in the passenger seat. The headset blocked out the noise from the pounding engine, but that pounding still surrounded me, surrounded everything. Rose’s voice was small and distant at the center of that rhythm, but I could hear his words clearly.
“Washington has shut our mission down completely,” Rose went on. “Shut us down and shut us out. I was afraid even to try to get you protection for your escape, afraid they’d alert the guards-and that the guards would shoot you. The best I could do was post Mike out there with an off-road vehicle and the best surveillance equipment I could find so he could track you whenever you made your run for it. But all the same, you’re just plain lucky you got out of Abingdon alive. You have no idea how much danger you were in.”
The pilot glanced over from the seat beside me. He was a small, thin man named Patel. He had black hair, large eyes, and an easygoing smile. When he heard Rose’s words, he jogged his eyebrows at me, up and down, comically. As if potentially getting killed in a prison break was just some big adventure. Then with a quick grin, he faced forward. He flew the plane low over the dark territory beneath. I guessed that he was intentionally staying below any controlled airspace. Now and then, we heard a voice from a control tower somewhere, but Patel never answered. He flew the plane without a word.
Rose was sitting right behind me, right next to Mike in the cramped rear seats. His voice continued in my ear. “Already, since the escape, Abingdon has started to come apart at the seams. The guards are totally corrupt, some bought off by the Nazis, some by the Islamists. That guy Dunbar was running some kind of drug ring. Even the warden was in on it. The whole place was a cesspool.”
“Gee,” I said, “and it seemed so pleasant on the surface.”
I heard Mike chuckle. Rose didn’t chuckle. He wasn’t the chuckling sort.
“So like I said, you’re out of the frying pan,” he went on. “But you’re no better off. Worse, maybe, if it comes to that. Now the cops are hunting for you all over the place. Washington denies you ever worked for them. And when I try to pass on your warnings, my bosses won’t believe me.”
“They won’t believe you about the Great Death?”
“They say they’ve got any number of threats centered around New Year’s Eve and that security is as tight as it can be everywhere. Even if they wanted to, there’s no way to amp it up any further.”
“But Prince was counting on that from the beginning.”
“He must’ve been, if he’s planning to go through with it.”
“So where does that leave us?”
I heard Rose sigh over the headset. “Alone, pretty much. Or, at least, if we’re going to get some help, if we’re going to get anyone to take us seriously, we’ve got to figure out just what exactly Prince is planning. Without that, I can’t call in reinforcements. There’s nowhere to call them to.”
“But I’m pretty sure it’s going to take place in New York. Isn’t that enough? Couldn’t we tell them-”
“You’re ‘pretty sure,’” said Rose sourly. “That’s my point. And no, it’s not enough for you to be pretty sure of something or even to remember something. We have to prove it if we’re going to get any action.”
I rolled that over in my mind for a moment as the plane moved smoothly over a small town. With the town’s streetlights and houselights glittering in the night, it looked like some kind of jewel lying on a black background.
“So what are we going to do?” I said finally. “We’ve only got twenty-four hours left. If that.”
It was a moment before he answered-so long, in fact, I looked over my shoulder at him. Then he said, “Well, for one thing, we’ve got to use the information we already have and try to pinpoint exactly where Prince is planning to go. And for another thing…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
The plane bucked and wavered as it flew through a pocket of rough air. The stars dipped and rose at the windows.
“What?” I said finally. “For another thing, what?” This time, when I looked back at him, I saw Rose and Mike exchange a glance.
“We’re hoping you can help us, Charlie,” Rose said then. “We’re hoping you’ll remember something that will help us.”
“Well, I’ll tell you whatever I can…”
They glanced at each other again.
After that, no one said anything for a while. I sat there, staring out the window, thinking back over the memories that had returned to me, the memory especially of that conversation I’d overheard inside the barracks. Prince and Waylon and Sherman plotting out the Great Death. I had this feeling that I was missing something, some essential clue to the exact nature of their plan. I had this feeling there was something I knew that I didn’t know I knew.
“What’s a C.O. device?” I asked. “I heard Prince say they were going to acquire it from the Russians.”
“Yeah, we’re checking on that now,” Rose said. “Is there anything else? Anything else you remember that might help? Something specific about the location of the attack? The time?”
I shook my head. “Not that I can think of…” But again, I had that feeling that there was something, something just beyond my memory
…
Rose fell silent behind me. He sat back in his seat.
The plane trundled on. I tried to think back, page through my memories, but I couldn’t think of anything useful.
After a little while, Patel turned to me from the pilot seat. He seemed completely unaffected by our conversation: cheerful and relaxed. He looked like he’d just been waiting for his chance to speak to me.
“I hear you want to be in the Air Force,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“So you ever pilot a plane before?”
“A couple of times. I took some lessons-you know, taking off and landing-but I never got my license. I never even soloed.”
“Want to fly it now?”
I sat up straight. It was the best offer I’d had in-well, for as long as I could
think of. “Yeah, you kidding? Absolutely!”
Patel let go of the pilot’s stick and let me take the copilot’s control, which was right in front of me. My feet found the rudders on the floor and my eyes scanned the cockpit’s instrument panels, trying to remember which digital readout was which and what they all meant. I followed the track laid out for me on the GPS, turning the plane slightly this way or that, remembering to work the pedals at the same time I turned the yoke.
The feel of the plane came back to me quickly. Soon I was holding it steady, looking out through the windshield at the sky. It’s an almost magical feeling, flying a small plane at night. You feel like you’re sailing on a sea of stars. Best of all, for long, good minutes, it took my mind off things, off the heaviness inside me, the dread of what was coming next. It gave me a break from the tension that had tied me in knots for so long, ever since I’d been put in prison. Plus, it was fun.
I had no idea how deadly serious it would be before all this was over.
After a while, Patel took the plane back. “If it’s been some time since you took lessons, I think you better let me land it.”
“Yeah, especially at night,” I said.
The Cessna started to drop down through the darkness. I peered out through the windshield, but I didn’t see anything ahead of us. I could just make out the darker darkness of the earth beneath the sky. But there was no place to land.
Then, a light gleamed and died. Patel corrected the plane’s course and headed toward it. I watched him as he pushed in the throttle, raised the flaps, slowed the plane so that its nose angled down and the plane sank out of the sky.
The light flashed below again and for a moment, I could make out the shape of a small dirt runway in the middle of an overgrown field, just at the bottom of a small hill. The setting looked familiar to me somehow.
“Where are we?” I asked into the headset microphone.
Rose’s voice came back to me over the headphones. “Look to your right.”
I did. At first I couldn’t see a thing. Then, against the background of the starry sky, an unmistakable shape appeared. It was a building, a house, with a large central tower and two smaller towers, one to either side.
It was that quirky mansion that served as Prince’s headquarters.
The plane dropped down slowly toward the earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Reunion
An odd feeling came to me as I walked into that crazy place again. It wasn’t exactly a feeling of nostalgia and not exactly deja vu either. But the halls and rooms with their great curtains and enormous fireplaces and marble statues and staring portraits on the walls and shining knickknacks everywhere-it all felt familiar to me and I liked that feeling. I liked remembering. I liked having my life back in my mind again.
Rose led the way, up the front porch and through the doors into the great foyer. Up the broad stairs and down the thickly carpeted hallway. Back to the room that Prince had used for his headquarters.
As I stepped in, I broke into a smile-a tremendously painful smile, I have to say, because my face had stiffened up from all its bruises-but a smile all the same.
There, swiveling around in the high-backed chair where I’d first seen Prince, was Milton One-Waterman’s tech guy. He was a youngish guy with a square head, Asian features. They called him Milton One because he was the inventor and operator of Milton Two, a security device that had come in pretty handy to me once not long before. He and all his friends had disappeared when Waterman was killed and I didn’t know where they’d gotten to. I’d worried they were dead. I was glad to see Milton One alive. I saluted him and he gave me a big wave hello.
Then I recognized the others. There was Dodger Jim, Waterman’s tough muscleman. He was still wearing his Dodgers baseball cap. And there was the crow-faced woman-I never knew her name. She was the one who’d injected me with the antidote that started my memory coming back. They were hovering around Milton One, looking over his shoulder at a small computer he had set up on Prince’s enormous desk.
Despite my growing sense of dread, I was glad to see them. After the evil weeks in Abingdon, it was good to be back among allies.
“How goes it?” Rose asked them.
“Well, I have bad news and really bad news,” said Milton One casually. “Which do you want first?”
“Gimme the bad news,” said Rose. “Let’s build up slowly to the really bad.”
Milton One’s voice remained casual, but I could see by the look in his eyes that he was about to tell us something really gnarly. “Nothing is a hundred percent certain, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the fact that Prince has secured the device he was after.”
I heard Rose let out a long weary breath.
“Is that the C.O. device?” I asked him.
He nodded wearily.
“What is it?”
It was Milton One who answered me. “C.O. stands for Cylon Orange. It’s a chemical weapon invented in the Soviet Union.”
“When the USSR went down, their small supply of C.O. disappeared,” Rose said. “We always figured someone would try to sell it off to some rogue state or bad actors.”
“And now you think Prince has gotten it?”
“Looks that way.”
“Six canisters’ worth,” said Milton One.
I remembered hearing Prince’s voice from the barracks:
Six canisters… It’s more than enough. Six canisters can be carried by a single man. So nothing will stop it, even if it comes down to me alone.
“What’s it do?” I asked.
“The canisters hold the C.O. in an inert liquid form. You put them inside a device about the size of a backpack. When the device is activated, it injects an acid into the canisters that turns the C.O. into a poisonous gas, which is then sprayed out into the air.”
I stood there silent for a moment, trying to get a picture of this in my mind.
Then Rose added: “The whole point about Cylon Orange is its density. Six canisters is enough to wipe out four city blocks.”
Now everyone was silent. I felt my lips go dry. I felt my heart beating so hard I thought the others could surely hear it. “Four city blocks in New York City on New Year’s Eve…”
“How many people you figure that is?” Mike asked Rose.
Rose tilted his head, considering. “If it’s in Times Square, where the ball drops? I don’t know. Could be a million people there. A million, at least.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t think of what to say. A million people. The Great Death.
“They should shut the city down,” I said finally. “Cancel the celebration. Block off the bridges and tunnels.”
More silence. Everyone nodded slowly.
Milton One said quietly: “That’s the really bad news.”
We waited for him to go on.
Milton One: “I’ve got everything there is now. Every record, every correspondence that wasn’t destroyed beyond recovery. There’s no data left to mine. And in all of it, I came up with not one clue where Prince is headed. Nothing about the exact nature of his plan. His target… Nothing.”
I looked from Milton One to Rose to Mike.
“What’s that mean?” I asked them. “What’s that got to do with anything? We know Prince is headed for New York…”
“No, we don’t,” said Rose. “We think he is. You think he is. You sort of remember…”
“I do remember.”
“But you don’t remember anything definitive, Charlie. It’s like I told you. The government has got a dozen threats like this, all the time, especially at holidays. They can’t just shut down every city in the country, send everyone into a panic. Unless we have something more definitive, more certain…”
“But…,” I started, but the look on his face-the looks on his face and Mike’s face-made me stop. I knew if there was something to be done, they’d already be doing it.
What happened next was kind of awful. There
was this silence. Everyone in the room just sitting there, standing there, without saying a word. If they were anything like me, they were thinking about those million people in Times Square. Prince. The canisters of gas.
Even if I have to do it on my own, the Great Death will not be stopped.
Standing in that room, I could almost feel the time passing, the night passing, tomorrow coming, New Year’s Eve.
The silence stretched out and out, moment after moment. It gave me a terrible sense of hopelessness.
And then-this was the awful part-then I realized: Everyone was looking at me. That’s why they were silent. They were waiting. Waiting for me to say something. Something that would help them. Something that would give us a clue, a direction. A chance.
Mike was the one who asked the question out loud: “Is there anything, Charlie? Anything you might have forgotten? Any memory that might be worth digging up, going over again?”
“What do you mean? I’ve told you everything I know…”
Now it was Rose’s turn. “Do you think it might be worth… going back?”
“Going back?”
“In time. In your memory. To see…”
I heard a noise from behind the desk: a sharp intake of breath; a muttered complaint. I turned and looked. It was the crow-faced woman. She had straightened up behind the big chair. She was… scowling, is the only word I can think of to describe it.
“This is insane,” she said. “Tell him.”
I looked from her to Mike and Rose. “Tell me what?”
Again, Mike and Rose exchanged a glance. Then, as if they’d agreed to it silently, Mike did the talking.
“We’re at a dead end, chucklehead. You’ve heard the danger. If you’re right-and we think you are-we’re looking at a disaster beyond anything we can imagine. In fact, that’s the problem: No one can imagine it. No one’s going to pull the trigger and shut down New York on the basis of our guesswork.”
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